Electric computer games, Beast Mastery hunting and obscure references

Readers who are reading will notice the conspicuous absence of words on this here Internet weblog lately. This is because I’ve been on holiday for a while and so away from my computer (and Warcraft). The main subject of this site being the World of Warcraft (and hunting in it specifically), this has left me with little subject matter.

I’ve also not played since I’ve got back – I’m messing around with other games at the moment. WoW is an amazing game, but sometimes it’s just not what I want to play. With that said, I’ve got a beastmastery-flavoured post in the works which I hope to have up this week. Now then, here’s what’s occupying my time of late:

Mount and Blade: Warband – I’ve had my eye on this for a while since I played quite a lot of the original Mount and Blade. It went down to 50% in the Steam sale recently so I picked it up. Single-player it’s still pretty obviously the same game, and I haven’t had time to jump into multiplayer yet.

Alien Swarm – Valve (quite possibly my favourite company currently in the world) released a new co-op top down alien shooter. It’s very good! It’s also very free. The big thing (apart from it being basically better than any other game in the genre… but free…) is that for your investment of £0 (that’s $0 USD) you get to play around with the source engine. Not only is the game itself hugely moddable (new maps were out three hours after release) but it opens the door for some serious free source-engine game development in the same vein as the Unreal SDK.

Soon:
STO – The new season of Star Trek Online looks pretty good, and I still have my free 30 days waiting. A friend of mine from my old Fleet days has convinced me to give it a go. I played in the pre-release beta event and quite enjoyed it – needed some polish and a few things sorted, but basically decent. Then I went back to Northrend. If the updates have improved it as much as my informant claims, it may just be time for me to jump between Warcraft phases.

World of Warcraft – again. Did you think I had forgotten? Did you think I had forgiven? Death to the scourge and death to the… Lich King?